I thought it worth mentioning, as reading yesterday's papers you might be forgiven for thinking an entirely different set of circumstances had prevailed at the All-England Club.

From the front page of every paper beamed out the sunny smile of Laura Robson, the astonishingly talented teenager whose name can no longer be published without being followed by the phrase "the 14-year-old British tennis sensation".

Anyone emerging from a brief vacation in a cave, for instance, would surely have assumed, reading the media coverage, that it was Robson, not the athletic American, who was the overall Wimbledon champion; that the Australian-born youngster who now lives down the road from Centre Court was the first Briton since Virginia Wade in 1977 to snaffle a singles title there.

The truth is slightly less elevated. Even as Williams was picking up her fifth championship, Robson was overcoming a Thai player two years her senior to win the girls' tournament on court number one. One of those victories carries with it a handsome gold plate and a cheque for £750,000; the other, a nice little trophy and a guaranteed nomination for the BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year, plus, in Robson's case, the unenviable proposition of being burdened with a success-starved nation's desperation for vicarious triumph.

And burdened she now is. Other recent young champions have demonstrated that progress from junior success is fraught with obstacles, particularly for adolescent Britons, with all that expectation shovelled on to their adolescent shoulders.

Jamie Bailey, for instance, won the Australian Open boys' event in 1993, but found the insistent pressure of the next step up so intolerable he retired from the game after only one season as a professional. Yet already Ladbroke's are offering odds on Robson winning Wimbledon as early as next season.

Those who know say that if anyone can make it to the top as an adult player, Robson can. Watching her beat an obdurate opponent on Saturday convinced the experts that she is in possession of every playing prerequisite needed.

This is the real deal all right. Still there was some concern, even in the media centre, about the consequent intensity of the focus on her. As she was led into the press conference room there were those expressing a concern that the urgency for a British winner would turn to self-destructiveness. She is 14, for heaven's sake: what 14-year-old can be expected to withstand such scrutiny?

As it happened, she turned out to be as preternaturally accomplished in front of journalists as she was on court. Charming, articulate, funny, she batted away the probing with a polish that made Williams, following her on to the interview podium, look tongue-tied.

One cynic suggested that her social ease was derived from being home-schooled: she has never been exposed to the corrosive influence of the British education system.

Not that level-headedness on such a scale is necessarily a prerequisite for success in tennis. The endless analysis of performance can often lead to a self-obsession that borders on the certifiable. It is an odd orbit into which the youngster is about to spin.

Still, if you were constructing the sporting heroine from scratch, it might well resemble Robson. Effervescent, clean-limbed, steely-nerved and astonishingly physically gifted, she is in possession of everything required to be the genuine international sporting star the nation craves.

The girl doesn't even subscribe to the fashion for emitting an earth-trembling howl with every shot, believing grunting to be unsportsmanlike. No wonder she is being targeted as a commercial brand, a certainty to be a millionaire by the time she is 16. A contract for her autobiography, to be published this Christmas, is doubtless already being prepared.

We are about to embark on a fascinating sporting experiment. We have on our hands a potential star, but such is our collective anxiety for her to succeed, we seem determined to do everything we can to undermine her chances, from bathing her in the unforgiving arc light of celebrity to financially rewarding her to the point where all the thirst to achieve is quenched. In our urgency for success, we demonstrate an unfailing ability to do all the wrong things.

In danger of smothering the golden fledgling long before it has the chance to spread its wings, we are, in short, nothing more than a nation of pushy parents.

Yet at the moment the idea of carrying the country's hopes seems to amuse the girl herself. "I think it's quite funny," she said. If only the rest of us could demonstrate the maturity of this particular 14-year-old.